Livin' Loud: ARTitation

Product Information

The book, which currently doesn’t have a release date, will guide readers “through his thought process and inspirations, sharing anecdotes and discussing the connotations behind his striking, one-of-a-kind pieces of art”. Chuck pays homage to his musical peers and influences: from the Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan to Woody Guthrie and Nina Simone; hip-hop legends including Ice Cube and Run the Jewels; and Def Jam labelmates Run-DMC and Beastie Boys. With audacious style, Chuck D—activist and cofounder of Public Enemy—chronicles his personal life and American history as it unfolded during 2020 and early 2022 in this set of three thought-provoking illustrated diary volumes . Spanning the onset of COVID-19 through the first year of the Joe “Bye-Don” administration, Chuck D lends his powerful artistic voice to one of the most tumultuous periods in American history, and puts it in a capsule. Following on from the announcement of his four-part PBS/BBC documentary, Fight The Power: How Hip-Hop Changed The World, (premiering January 31), the Public Enemy legend will discuss his musical and artistic trajectory offering unprecedented insight into his life and work.

Recently, I’ve reverted into the arts, combining all these elements in my work, still trying to change the world. Summer of Hamnis the bound journal Chuck D carried with him in the summer of 2022--a summer marked by a particularly high rate of gun death. Before forming Public Enemy in 1985 at twenty-five, the erstwhile Carlton Ridenhour studied to be a commercial artist.He goes on to share his journey into the world of hip-hop, a genre that he helped to curate, cut through and form. Guns and hip-hop, guns and God, they are complicated, divisive subjects in America, he suggests, but that’s also the reason he’s tackling them in the new book. The result, STEWdio: The Naphic Grovel ARTrilogy of Chuck D, is three volumes of one-hundred-plus, one-page drawings. And he interprets everything, from the raw pain of mass shootings to climate change, to the war in Ukraine to the Black Lives Matter movement. With a foreword by Rage Against the Machine’s Tom Morello and featuring over 250 of Chuck D's paintings, sketches and drawings, Livin' Loud includes a commentary of over 13,000 words in which he offers unprecedented insight into his life and work.

The co-founder and front man of legendary hip hop group Public Enemy unleashes his commentary on contemporary events with the activist instinct that made the hip hop pioneers a social message phenomenon.A separate publication, Summer of Hamn, a blistering critique of America’s gun violence, will be published in October. Chuck D's edition of 1,200 copies worldwide comes in three different art sets, each numbered and signed by the author. From Chuck D bearing his heart and soul in a new trilogy to Jason Derulo revealing his 15 rules to succeeding in life, there are so many good books by Black authors to discover this June.